features.
So now inxi and pinxi will grab the inxi.1 or pinxi.1 man file and install it on
systems that do not have -U blocked. The -U block of course remains the same.
New features:
1. now does not require root or 'file' to get unmounted fs type. Also, for many
mounted partitions, rather than showing the meaningless fuseblock it will usually
get the filesystem right.
2. -U now works with optional --man option to download man page for pinxi
and -U 3 dev server updates. This gets around the fact I had to remove the gz files
from master to get the size small enough to make maintainers happy. Non branch
inxi master works as before, updates both from github or from dev server, depending
on your selection.
3. Thanks very much to the people who have been contributing in a positve way,
helping to make inxi better. The untold number of small and large new features,
small glitches, etc, that have been fixed this week are simply too many too list.
Many to most were inxi bugs or weaknesses, now corrected.
4. binxi branch has now been made fully operational, though I do not plan on doing
any work beyond the mothballing of that venerable program (gawk->bash inxi), it's
fully operational, it updates, it gets its man page, but all as binxi, so you can,
as with pinxi, run all of them separately. This officially terminates my support
for Gawk/Bash inxi, which can be found as binxi in the inxi-legacy branch.
5. pinxi has been promoted to permanent development branch, where bug fixes, new
features, etc, will be tested, along with man page updates etc. This will help
reduce the number of commits to master branch.
6. Audio / Network usb cards now show the true driver(s). There are often more
than one for audio, that's a nice enancement.
7. inxi outputs to json / xml, which will probably interest some developers
eventually, well it already did, that was going to wait, but someone wanted it.
8. Apt repo handler now supports DEB822 format, which is not an easy format to
parse.
==========================================================
MAINTAINERS:
Note the following: despite my strong dislike for tags, every commit that touches
either inxi or inxi.1 man page will be tagged if I think they would be something
relevant to distro packagers. While github insists on calling my tags releases,
I want to be crystal clear: inxi has one and only one 'release', the current master
branch version. The tagged commits that github calls releases are NOT releases,
they are just tagged commits. The version I release tomorrow will be the current
master, and all previous versions will be obsolete and will not be supported.
The .gz files have been removed from the master branch history, thus shrinking it
a lot. I have removed for this reason the master-plain branch, which mirrored
master and provided a gz free branch, but apparently this was simply ignored so
there's no reason to keep it going. If you insist on grabbing all the branches and
find more data in there, then please correct your practices, you are only getting
the data from the master branch.
inxi is rolling release software and has no releases, so the tags are supposed
to create some illusion that a tag actually means something. Since it doesn't,
I decided to take the path of least resistance and just add an auto tagging tool
to my commit scripts and use it when it seems appropriate, like on this commit.
All development work now will happen via the pinxi branch, so that makes the process
a lot cleaner, since I can now basically beta test all new commmits to master.
pinxi and binxi are both standalone versions of inxi, they have their own config
and data directories, config files, man pages, etc.
-----------------------------------------------------
New Perl inxi is already way ahead of Gawk/Bash inxi, more features, more accurate,
and most bugs being fixed now are because a lot of people are contributing eyes and
testing, and are finding stuff that was wrong, or simply missing, on old inxi as
well as on Perl inxi. Fixes to Perl inxi (>2.9) will not be rolled into to binxi
since the entire reason I spent over 4 months on this project was to never have to
touch Gawk/Bash inxi again.
Most imporant, however, is that the simple fact was, Gawk/Bash inxi has been
nearly impossible to work on despite my following rigorous practices in coding,
and I simply won't work with that type of stuff anymore. Perl 5.x is a true delight
in comparison, and makes adding new features, enhancing others, far easier, or
even possible, where it wasn't before.
On a technical level, I have tested Perl inxi heavily, and it will run on all
Perl 5.x versions back to 5.008, which is the cutoff point. This was not that
hard to do, which is why I picked Perl 5.x as the language. This means that
you can drop, just as with binxi, Perl inxi onto a 10 year old system, or
older, and it will run fine, albeit a touch slowly, but must faster than binxi.
-----------------------------------------------------
So far users are really liking the new one, it's usually faster in most cases,
the output is cleaner, there's more data, more options, and basically it's
gotten the thumbs up from all the testers, and there have been a LOT, who have
helped. I want to give a special thanks to the following distros for their
exceptional support and testing:
0. the people who hang out on irc.oftc.net #smxi. Very patient, will test things
with astounding patience, so thanks to them. Archerseven, iotaka and KittyKatt
have been been incredibly helpful when it comes to testing and debugging, and
finding corner cases that I would never have found.
1. AntiX: they were the first to beta test pinxi, and found massive numbers of
bugs, and stuck with the testing for a long time. They made testing possible for
the next wave of testers, my hats off to them, I've always liked them.
2. Manjaro also was very helpful, and found more issues and enhancements.
3. Ubuntu forums users found more, and helped enhance many faetures
4. Mint users have been very helpful, and were the impetus for some nifty
new features, ilke switching all color codes off when output is piped or sent
to file. They have reminded me of how valuable people's views can be who may not
share the same tech world view as you, but are still very talented and observant
individuals.
5. Slackware users provided some very thoughtful feedback, which was no surprise
but welcome nonetheless, thanks.
6. Same with Debian forums, again, some very useful and constructive ideas and
observations, and some very arcane and odd hardware that exposed even more corner
case bugs.
And several other distros were also helpful, each in their own way. Solus for
example now has their package manager added in repos.
and a small bug for blank files there.
Second, made the --output error message more clear for bad file structure now lists
the 3 requirements: must be full path, must be writeable directory, and must have
a file in it.
Third, another subtle thing, after a lot of research, am trying the MiB GiB format
because it's technically more accurate and less ambiguous than GB, which is used
either to refer to 1000 bite blocks OR to 1024 blocks, depending on the platform etc.
So rather than hope people get it, trying that slightly more wordy format, and maybe
if people wonder what it is.
It's here! Perl inxi, first official release. So many changes, really too many
to list.
But here's a few:
1. of course, full rewrite to Perl 5.x. Supports as old as 5.008, as new as current.
2. Better line length nandlers. Fully dynamic, robust, shrinks and expands to fit
either taste or viewport.
3. Long options for all options now, plus of course the short options everyone
is used to.
4. New options: --usb; --slots (pci slot report); --sleep (change cpu sleep time);
and many more. Check --help or man page for details.
5. Vastly improved --recommends, now does per distro package recommends, and shows
only Linux data to Linux systems, and BSD data to BSD systems.
6. Hugely improved debugger as well.
7. Far more accurate output, most output is now in key/value pairs, because:
8. inxi now exports to json and xml! See --output/--output-file for info.
9. Enhancedd repo output, added deb822 type, solus
10. Radically enhanced network data, now shows all IP / IF devices connected to
each nic, not just one, both IP v4 and v6.
11. USB audio and network device actual drivers
12. better handling of compiler data.
13. Basic ARM machine data now, if present to inxi
14. Graphics: per card driver info alongside the original xorg drivers.
15. Better integration of partitions, RAID, unmounted partitions, and HDD data.
16. Better sensors handling of free video driver sensor data, well, not better,
it's now there, along with fan speeds for gpus.
17. RAID is enhanced, and now can show > 1 RAID type on a system, and the RAID
is improved.
18. Much improved disk/partition/memory sizing, inxi now always works internally
with KB units, and changes them on output to the appropriate units.
19. Fully redone man page for all the new options and the long options.
And so much more. Anyway, here it is, the first release.
2018-03-19 release. I'm putting the last issue requests on the last forums,
so assuming no real further bugs found, expect Perl inxi 2.9.01 to hit around
Monday or Tuesday. If any bugs are found, of course, those will be fixed before
release of the new Perl inxi.
Basically, if you want to see if you can find bugs, this is the time to do it, not
AFTER release. I've posted on many forums, and have given the various distros a
chance to help squash the bugs their users might see, some have been fantastic
(AntiX, you were the best by far), others, not so much. Their loss in the latter
case since the purpose of beta testing is to find bugs before, not after, release.
If you want to see the differences in recommends, and dependencies, grab pinxi
development branch here:
wget -O pinxi https://github.com/smxi/inxi/raw/inxi-perl/pinxi
or:
git clone https://github.com/smxi/inxi --branch inxi-perl --single-branch
and run: pinxi --recommends
The main thing I'd strongly urge all maintainers to add, for long term stability
and speed and reliability, is dig, which can be used if present to get very fast,
reliable, WAN IP information.
All of the other recommends are pretty much the same, for graphics, xdpyinfo,
xrandr, and glxinfo. For networking, ip or ifconfig, along with dig. For all usb
related identification, lsusb, unfortunately, I wish I could get rid of that tool,
it's very slow, but I can't. The --recommends output shows the complete set.
Obviously, Bash and Gawk are no longer recommends, nor are the tools like grep,
sed, tr, wc, etc, all those are done with Perl, so any shell plus Perl 5.08 or
newer Perl 5.x is all that's really required, beyond normal system reporting
tools like lspci etc.
For json/xml export, two Perl modules are needed, again, see --recommends
Making sure tarball etc is up to date, so it can be stored in 'tarball's branch.
MAINTAINERS:
Pinxi 2.9.00-xxx-p (inxi-perl branch) is nearing completion of its beta test cycle,
and, barring any new issues or bugs (TEST IT NOW AND REPORT ISSUES NOW!), I expect
to release pinxi 2.9.00 as inxi 2.9.01 shortly after I complete the advanced
RAID feature, which should be this week.
If no real issues appear during the following week after the inxi 2.9.0 release, it
will be moved to inxi 3.0.0, as the first stable Perl inxi release.
There will be a new branch, inxi-legacy, that will have the Gawk->Bash inxi 2.3..56
files for historical purposes only. No further work will be done on inxi 2.3 from
now on.
cpu output issues. Now inxi handles > 8 cores in terms of output filters,
descriptions, correctly noting that it's multithreaded.
Because AMD has entered the Multithreading game, I've changed the trade term:
HT - HyperThreading to MT - MultiThreading to support both Intel and AMD variants.
Updated CPU output filters to also account for these very large core counts.
I believe this commit now adds full support for the new Ryzen series, but I'll have
to see when it comes to other variants that may appear. I've tried to future proof
the MT tests, but I won't know of those are fully functional and accurate until
inxi sees the real data.
Because I don't want to break existing cpu logic, I just added in a rizen switch,
which will just use cpu_core_count value, then trigger HT output.
This fix may or may not work, but the issue poster vanished and has not followed up.
For now I'm keeping this a Ryzen specific adjustment, but it may be safe to extend
it further, that is, if siblings > 1 && siblings = 2 * cores then it's HT.
issue a forum poster raised, which is the fact that despite the fact that GNU/Linux
has had reasonably ok zfs support for years now, inxi only tested for zfs on bsd
systems.
This has been corrected. Due to the complexity of handling software raid, inxi
will now test first for ZFS data, if none is found, it will then test for
/proc/mdstat.
In a perfect world I'd like to have full dynamic Raid support, but I'm missing
all the key ingredients required to add that:
1. systems to test on
2. software raid, I don't use it
3. data collection for non mdraid and zfs software raid, including the values
possible to gather from all non software raid.
Basically, the only way I'd extend -R raid option is if I get direct ssh access to
a machine that uses the alternate software raid type, otherwise it would take
forever to figure out the options.
Since the number of people who might be actually running zfs and mdraid and
using inxi probably numbers in the 10 globally, I figured this solution was a fine
way to handle adding zfs without messing up mdraid, which is more common on linux.
It also does not break BSDs, since bsds as far as I know don't use mdraid, and don't
have /proc/mdraid in the first place.
Also redid the man page to add -! 41, -! 42, -! 43, -! 44 options, which bypass
curl, fetch, wget, and all of them, respectively. Plus making the lines less wide.
That should make those people who actually use 80 column wide vi as an editor
happy, lol.
easier and more predictable to find. Better section headers, all ordering alpha
by subsections.
Fixed some small debugger gatherer oversights as well.
Note that I made the debugger stuff more portable, so I could use it in another
program.
Note that this is the last choice because it's slow, the order has been revised:
1. curl
2. wget
3. fetch
4. Perl 5 HTTP::Tiny
5. OpenBSD ftp
wget has been downgraded due to the recent 1.19-2 bug with wget -O that did
not get resolved quickly, and which should never have been released since
that's a basic wget action, which means they aren't testing gnu wget the way
they should be.
All inxi downloaders can now use this option. However, in my tests it's signicantly
slower to use HTTP::Tiny than curl or wget, so inxi will test for the downloaders
in that order. While -i uses dig as it's primary IP tool, if dig is not installed,
the IP will follow the same downloader priority. -U and -w/-W use downloaders.
Because HTTP::Tiny is optional, and is merely used if wget/curl/fetch are not
installed, I would not consider Perl to be a real dependency yet, just an option, so
I guess for packager maintainers, Perl should be added as a recommends, or a
dependency if you want to fully support the debugger options (Core Modules).
While I'm still not sure which Perl modules I'm going to be using, I'm sticking
for now to Core Modules, the standard, with some experimental exceptions that
would only be used if the user had them present.
Long term the goal is to get rid of as many dependencies as possible, replacing
them were possible with Perl tools, but this is going to take forever, if it
ever happens, so don't hold your breath.
In the future, I expect more and more components that were gawk to be rewritten
to Perl (Core Modules), slowly, however, very slowly.
Updated --recommends to indicate the downloader options more clearly as well.
Added new options for bypassing curl (-! 41), fetch (-! 42) wget (-! 43), or
curl, fetch, and wget (-! 44) to disable all of them. This is in case one of
those is broken or you want to test Perl downloader, mostly.
Also cleaned up debugger output and made debugger portable to other scripts.
ARM data collection in /sys.
Using 'tree' now instead of ls if it is installed for debugger /sys tree listing.
Added to recommends. Updated bluetooth recommends to note it's dev only. That
should fix issue #127
branches, simplified the options. This corresponds to updates on github where
I'm finally bringing the alternate location self updater back into operational
state after a long dormant period.
Also, and this may be of interest to some maintainers, please note, there is
a new branch: master-plain which does NOT have the gz files inxi.1.gz and
inxi.tar.gz
If you want to avoid the big clones, you can use that branch with this command:
git clone https://github.com/smxi/inxi --branch master-plain --single-branch
And that should only track the basic 3 files: inxi inxi.1 and inxi.changelog
This fixes issue #94
explicitly setting Passive => 1 (true) for some systems and firewall
configurations.
This corrects a failure to upload issue I experienced for a test remote
system that had a different firewall configuration than the dev system has.
nvme disk capacity in full disk capacity listing. Adds nvme name/serial/firmware
revision number. The latter is a new -Dxx output option. Note that as far as I could
tell, so far, nvme is the only disk type that has firmware revision data.
Added support for nvme disk temperature as well, that requires the cli tool nvme.
Updated AMD microarchitecture list to be more granular and complete. Added Intel
microarch type. Note that they are releasing a few new microarchitectures soon but I
was not able to find any model numbers for those.
of the xiin.py tool, which is going to become obsolete when python 3 fully replaces python 2.
Since the odds of perl being around and stable are far higher than the odds of xiin.py
even working on python 3, I'm getting ahead of the race. Plus Perl is nicer to work with.
And Perl is a lot faster. I mean, a lot. Not slightly.
And it also works on much older systems, and does not have that Python version < 2.6
failure due to changing Python syntax even between sub versions. xiin.py never ran on
Python 2.5 even when it was relatively recent, which is one reason I'm removing all Python
from inxi.
Basically xiin.py worked only on Python 2.6 or 2.7, period.
Oh, and also handled issue #115 by not making -B show -M data.
The issue was not so much with xiin.py as with some new values in /sys that would
hang tree traverse, however, in order to remove the python dependency (except for
uploading -xx@ debugger data, until I can figure out how to do it with Perl), I
rewrote the tree traverse tool into Perl, which also makes it a lot faster and
easier to work with.
This issue appeared on kernel 4.11 as far as I can tell, some new values in /sys make
the traverse hang if it tries to read the values, **/parameters/** and **/debug/** seem
to be the main culprits, but inxi doesn't need that data anyway for debugging purposes
so it's just excluded.
in issue #118
The data seems to suggest that using POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_MIN_DESIGN as the factor will
be right more often than using POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_NOW.
Also optimized a bit more on the desktop id logic.
the conversion from mA hours to Wh, and had a math glitch too for charge (ma).
Not sure how this went undetected during testing, oh well. I assume that mA h is not
as common internally as Wh or something.
Anyway, it should be fixed.
-o, -p, -l, -u, -P, -S, -G, -N, -A
Now most output should tend to not wrap, though some strings are unpredictable and
will have to be trimmed by adding them to the min size trimmers one by one.
But it's much better than it was.
Note the following changes required to make the wraps more consistent:
-S - the gcc/bits have been made separate, like: bits: 32 gcc: 5.3
-C - the new microarchitecture -x option now is: arch: K7 [for example]
cache wraps to next line with arch. with -f, bmips now shows on same line as
arch/cache
would have caused failure on older systems. Also added Bash version checker.
Most ps aux data is now searched using bash parameter expansion, and several functions
that were in subshells are now printing to globals instead.
as well so you can see which revision of the cpu microarchitecture your cpu has.
Also fixed a few random vm id issues, I found cases where systemd believes it's bochs
but it is actually kvm, so now the systemd data is not fully trusted, but is confirmed.
Will need some updates to bring the family/model ids to fully current, but should show data for most
cpus. Next release will hopefully include latest model/family ids and microarchitecture names.
Note that while /proc/cpuinfo has the family/model id in decimal, the values are actually generally
found as hexadecimal, so inxi translates that interally so we can store the data the way it is presented.
See issue #116 for ongoing additions to this feature.
but Xorg has not started, which means inxi can't get the video driver from Xorg.0.log as with X.
Added in extra data collection from lspci -v to include the driver for graphics card. this is
only used, for now, if the initial Xorg based driver test works.
Note that this may also work for systems that have not yet started X out of X, in console, I'm
not sure about that, but the graphics driver reporting should be improved.
Note that I'm not yet linking the driver to the specific card/device, it's just going to show
in a comma separated list, I couldn't find multi card systems where the card types are different,
like amd gpu with nvidia card, for example.
But this should correct an issue, at least to start, with expanding wayland support for systems
that don't use or have not started the desktop with Xorg/X11 etc.
